In this issue, we focus on commercial agriculture, ISDS reform, gender, and land rights redress

Legal tools newsletter is sent out every four months to keep you updated on Legal Tools for Citizen Empowerment, a collaborative initiative to strengthen local rights and amplify local voices in natural resource investments.

Strengthening rights in commercial agriculture

Dear colleagues,

Commercial agriculture presents both opportunities and risks for rural people. Talk of ‘inclusive business’ can obscure power imbalances in agricultural value chains, and a key question is how best to support agency among rural producers and communities – that is, their ability to choose, act and influence realities around them.

In this newsletter we'll highlight recent academic research, reports and projects exploring – among other things – how legal empowerment can enhance rural producers’ agency, how women can claim a greater say in land governance and how to realign international investment frameworks with pursuit of sustainable development.

Please find all the publications and updates below, which we hope you will find useful. Please get in touch if our work resonates, we would be delighted to connect!

— Lorenzo Cotula
Team leader, Legal Tools Team

Blogs

Law and political economy of the global resource squeeze: can action rise to the challenge?

A collection of journal articles by Lorenzo Cotula investigates how national and international law is shifting control over the world’s natural resources and explores how people in resource-dependent countries are re-appropriating the law to secure their rights.

Development finance and land rights: how we can do better (Land Portal)

Lorenzo Cotula and Brendan Schwartz discuss the findings of a new report on how development finance institutions address land rights issues in their due diligence and investment processes, and possible areas for improvement

Strengthening women’s voices in land decisions: what works?

Philippine Sutz draws together key lessons from Ghana and Tanzania on how to get women’s voices heard in local land governance.

Project updates

Securing land rights in Cameroon

In January 2019, LandCam, a project to secure land rights in Cameroon, organised the “Land Tenure Week” – a week of debates, exchanges and training on key land governance challenges such as women’s land rights, land use planning, the role of traditional authorities in land governance and respect for land rights in private sector investments. LandCam is a joint effort of the Centre for Environment and Development (CED), the Network for Fight against Hunger (RELUFA) and IIED.

Amplifying women’s voices in land governance in Ghana, Senegal and Tanzania

In Tanzania, the Tanzania Women’s Lawyers Association (TAWLA) is working with local governments in the Kisarawe district to finalise the adoption of gender-sensitive by-laws on local land governance.

In Ghana, NETRIGHT and the Grassroot Sisterhood Foundation have been supporting Community Land Development Committees and local leaders in the Nanton Traditional area to finalise a model tenancy agreement.

These efforts are part of a wider project coordinated by IIED and also involving IED Afrique.

Supporting Mali’s mining law reform

In Mali, our briefing note discussing options for the ongoing mining law reform will be presented to government officials, parliamentarians and civil society donors. The event is part of a collaboration with Publish What You Pay (PWYP) Mali, which has long called for important reforms in the Malian mining sector.

Empowering Producers in Commercial Agriculture (EPIC)

In Malawi, IIED and the Women’s Legal Resources Centre (WOLREC) organised the inception phase of the EPIC project. With support from Imani Development, we are now finetuning the entry points for socio-legal empowerment amongst smallholder tea associations and their wider communities.

In Nepal, partners Community Self-Reliance Centre (CSRC) and the National Agricultural Cooperative Central Federation Ltd (NACCFL) are conducting context mapping to set the scene for testing socio-legal empowerment approaches with landless and small-scale producers engaging in commercial agriculture.

Events

Land and Poverty Conference 2019

IIED’s Legal Tools team will be attending the World Bank Land and Poverty Conference (Washington DC, 25-29 March 2019), presenting on gender in land governance (Tuesday 26 March, 3:45pm), socio-legal empowerment in commercial agriculture (Wednesday 27 March, 3:45pm), and land rights redress approaches (Thursday 28 March, 2pm).

UNCITRAL Working Group III’s 37^th session

We will also be attending the 37th session of the United Nations Commission on International Trade Law (UNCITRAL)’s Working Group on Investor-State Dispute Settlement Reform (New York, 1-5 April 2019).

IIED webinar on women and land governance

On 30 April, we will host a webinar sharing lessons from our project to strengthen women’s voices in land governance in East and West Africa. Partners from Ghana, Senegal and Tanzania will discuss how locally negotiated solutions can promote rural women’s participation in local decision making.

Research reports and briefings

Rural producer agency and agricultural value chains: What role for socio-legal empowerment?
Growing numbers of policies and programmes in low- and middle-income countries aim to integrate small-scale rural producers into agricultural value chains, but significant questions remain over how best to recognise the possibly divergent visions, interests and constraints of various actors, and support genuine agency among rural producers and their communities. This report explores whether socio-legal empowerment might help address these issues. A shorter briefing note summarises key findings. The report provides the conceptual foundations for our EPIC project.

Redress for land and resource rights violations: a legal empowerment agenda
This IIED briefing, produced in collaboration with the Tanzania Natural Resource Forum (TNRF) and the Global Legal Action Network, explores how communities struggle to assert their rights or obtain redress in the context of large-scale commercial investments in agriculture and extractive industries, and suggests a flexible mechanism for defending land rights.

UNCITRAL Working Group III: Reforming Procedures to Rebalance Investor Rights and Obligations
The work of the UNCITRAL provides an opportunity to rebalance the international investment regime – but only if the full gamut of key issues are identified. Requiring investors to uphold standards of responsible business conduct (RBC) is largely a function of substantive rights and obligations, but it also presents procedural dimensions that fall within the purview of the UNCITRAL process. Developed with the South Centre, this policy brief explores the issues and discusses possible options for reform.

Are Development Finance Institutions Equipped to Address Land Rights Issues?: A Stocktake of Practice in Agriculture
This report – produced as part of the LEGEND programme – reviews the approaches European and North American bilateral development finance institutions (DFIs) use to address land rights issues in their due diligence and investment processes, and provides recommendations to push the boundaries of international best practice.

Reforming investor-state dispute settlement: what about third-party rights?
Most debates on the international investment regime centre on disputes between investors and states, but foreign investment projects can also affect third parties such as local residents and indigenous peoples, and existing arrangements are not designed to protect their rights and interests. This briefing, prepared together with Durham Law School, is part of IIED’s work to feed into ongoing reforms of international investment treaties and dispute settlement.

Academic publications

Reconsidering Sovereignty, Ownership and Consent in Natural Resource Contracts: From Concepts to Practice
A wave of commercial investments in the natural resource sectors has rekindled debates about the place of contracts in the interface between economic governance and control over natural resources. This book chapter critically examines the foundations on which resource-related contracting rests and clarifies practical implications for these contracts – including their content and the process through which they are developed. The findings provide pointers for piecing together the possibly conflicting commercial and non-commercial interests at stake in natural resource contracts.

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